Design and analysis of serial limiting dilution assays with small sample sizes

C Macken - Journal of immunological methods, 1999 - Elsevier
We study the design of serial limiting dilution assays (SLDAs) for estimation of effector cell
frequency in settings that restrict severely the amount of material available for assay, and for
which the assumption of a single-hit Poisson model is reasonable. For different designs (that
is, dilution factor, number of dilution levels, and number of replicates at each level), we
evaluate maximum likelihood and minimum chi-square estimators, using four quantitative
criteria: probability of a non-informative assay (PNI), bias, coefficient of variation (CV), and …